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    Bright Magic: Stories
    Unavailable
    Bright Magic: Stories
    Unavailable
    Bright Magic: Stories
    Ebook277 pages4 hours

    Bright Magic: Stories

    By Alfred Doblin, Damion Searls and Günter Grass

    3/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Alfred Döblin’s many imposing novels, above all Berlin Alexanderplatz, have established him as one of the titans of modern German literature. This collection of his stories —astonishingly, the first ever to appear in English—shows him to have been a master of short fiction too.

    Bright Magic includes all of Döblin’s first book, The Murder of a Buttercup, a work of savage brilliance and a landmark of literary expressionism, as well as two longer stories composed in the 1940s, when he lived in exile in Southern California. The early collection is full of mind-bending and sexually charged narratives, from the dizzying descent into madness that has made the title story one of the most anthologized of German stories to “She Who Helped,” where mortality roams the streets of nineteenth-­century Manhattan with a white borzoi and a quiet smile, and “The Ballerina and the Body,” which describes a terrible duel to the death. Of the two later stories, “Materialism, A Fable,” in which news of humanity’s soulless doctrines reaches the animals, elements, and the molecules themselves, is especially delightful.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRandom House Publishing Group
    Release dateOct 25, 2016
    ISBN9781590179741
    Unavailable
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    Reviews for Bright Magic

    3/5

    7 ratings2 reviews

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    • 2/5
      Deep chords of naturalism brush against supernatural themes. I appreciated the construction of the stories but found myself immune to affect.

      Doblin remains an odd author for me. I’m not sure about my response. Much too cloudy to be vogue for this reappraisal. Let me think further.
    • 2/5
      maybe 2.5 . the later stuff was better, particularly "materialism, a fable"